Oracle documents cloud service

Hewlett-Packard has named Léo Apotheker as its new chief executive officer, hopefully putting an end to the company’s top-office turmoil after the abrupt resignation of former CEO Mark Hurd in August. Apotheker comes to Hewlett-Packard from the CEO position SAP, which specializes in business software applications aimed at large enterprises. Apotheker spent more than 20 years at SAP. HP has also appointed him to the HP Board of Directors.“HP has a powerful mix of businesses, products, and services, one of the most innovative cultures in the industry, and an accomplished management team who have played a critical role in its success,” said Apotheker, in a statement. “I am deeply honored to be joining the more than 300,000 dedicated HP employees.”Apotheker’s appointment surprised most industry watchers: he’s not the kind of headline name or Silicon Valley veteran many were expecting HP to court for its CEO position…and the investment … [Read more...] about HP names former SAP chief Léo Apotheker new CEO

Doing more for less in IT? Sure, easier said than done. But who said it couldn't be done?We took the question of how to cut information technology costs in the downturn to five analysts and consultants, who can both say and do. The result is the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 38, a periodic discussion and dissection of IT infrastructure related news and events.In this episode, our analyst guests make their top five recommendations for cutting enterprise IT costs amid the economic downturn. How does IT adapt and adjust to the downturn? Is IT to play a defensive role in helping to slash costs and reduce its own financial burden on the enterprise?Or, does IT help most on the offensive, in transforming businesses, or playing a larger role in support of business goals, with the larger IT budget and responsibility to go along with that? Can IT lead the way on how companies remake themselves and reinvent themselves during and after such an economic tumult?Or is IT good … [Read more...] about PODCAST IT Cost-Cutting: Consider Virtualization, Look to the Cloud, Check Out Open Source

A San Francisco jury has returned verdicts on three of four key questions over copyright issues in the high-profile courtroom trial between Oracle and Google. Neither company won a decisive victory, and the case has now moved on to a separate phase concerning patent claims, rather than copyright.Aren’t juries supposed to settle things? So how can a jury return a verdict and make the litigation between the two companies even murkier? Does it even matter what the jury thinks, since the judge in the case seems to have reserved the key question for himself — and himself alone? And what does it mean for the future of Android?Structure of the trialGoogle and Oracle’s legal dispute over whether Google needed a license to reverse engineer Sun’s Java technology for Android goes back more than two years, and negotiations and pre-trial proceedings have resulted in a very unusual trial structure.Judge William Alsup divided the trial into three phases. The first phase … [Read more...] about Oracle v. Google: The bewildering Java trial explained

Welcome to a special discussion on predicting how cloud computing will actually unfold for enterprises and their core applications and services in the next few years. Part of The Open Group 2011 Conference in San Diego, a live, on-stage panel examined the expectations of new types of cloud models -- and perhaps cloud specialization requirements -- emerging quite soon.By now, we're all familiar with the taxonomy around public cloud, private cloud, Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and my favorite, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). But we thought we would do you all an additional service and examine, firstly, where these general types of cloud models are actually gaining use and allegiance, and look at vertical industries and types of companies that are leaping ahead with cloud.Then, second, we're going to look at why one-size-fits-all cloud services may not fit so well in a highly fragmented, customized, heterogeneous, and specialized IT world -- which is, of … [Read more...] about PODCAST In the Cloud, One Size Does Not Fit All

Cloud Computing In the October 2012 edition of Scientific Computing, I described the rapid increase in biopharmaceutical R&D partnering and its effect on informatics architectures. I detailed how externalization and research virtualization were leading to a “de-evolution” of traditional technology alignments as companies resorted to e-mail and paper documents to share data between partners. I also described how systems optimized for internal consumption are often inadequate to facilitate secure collaboration across an ecosystem of geographically dispersed contractors, academics and strategic partners.Back in 2012, there were few vendor offerings specifically designed around a research virtualization paradigm. Services such as CDD Vault from Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) were available, but the majority of “cloud” laboratory informatics solutions were merely client/server LIMS and ELN products that vendors arranged to be hosted by a third party. However, … [Read more...] about Collaboration in the Cloud: Research Virtualization is Accelerating Market Evolution

Nothing like a recession to spur business growth.In the business process management (BPM) space, the current downturn has presented a major marketing opportunity for software and IT service firms. Sparked by customers seeking to cut costs and by innovations in e-commerce, the BPM market could easily double over the next several years.That explains why BPM providers continue to develop improvements to their products or otherwise position themselves to gain a competitive advantage.For example, one BPM player, Global 360, upgraded its offerings with the July release of its Process-360 10.0 program. That followed IBM's May rollout of enhancements for its BPM offerings, centered on its WebSphere product line. Also, Software AG a major BPM player headquartered in Germany, moved to bolster its capabilities when it announced on July 14 that it would acquire IT consultant IDS Scheer for US$674 million."The recession is placing a tremendous amount of pressure on enterprises to operate more … [Read more...] about MARKET SNAPSHOT The State of BPM: Poised for Takeoff

Amazon Cloud Drive offers 5 GB of free storage. It is not available in the iTunes App Store.Why? For long-term file storage, syncing isn't that big of a deal. However, if you want a place to dump files that you can access from another computer or via a Web browser -- so that changes you make on your primary computer are ready to rock everywhere -- the no-brainer need is for automatic syncing.Dropbox, of course, is the big leader in this space, with Microsoft's SkyDrive and Google Drive offering similar services. It's not like these competitors have terrible reputations, so why mess around with Amazon, too?Simplicity and 5 GB of free storage, that's why. You start out with just 2 GB free at Dropbox and 5 GB free with Google Drive, while Microsoft offers 7GB with SkyDrive. Apple's iCloud lets you have 5 GB, depending on how you want to add it all up, but iCloud is limited in the types of files that you can upload and effectively use unless you're a strict iWork fan.Right now, though, … [Read more...] about APP REVIEW Cloud Drive May Stoke Amazon Fans – for Others It’s ‘Meh’

Members of the cloud computing industry this week announced the Open Cloud Initiative, a non-profit organization to advocate open standards in cloud computing, at the OSCON 2011 open source convention in Portland, Ore.The organization maintains a set of Open Cloud Principles, adherence to which will determine whether a given product or service can indeed bear the open cloud label.It was set up because there is no common set of standards cloud service providers adhere to, which means data often can't be migrated between cloud service providers.The open cloud standards seek to ensure interoperability and make it easy to enter and leave cloud services regardless of what systems they use.This is the industry's second attempt at setting up an open cloud standard; Sun Microsystems launched an open cloud platform in March of 2009, but Oracle entered an agreement to purchase the company the following month and nothing's been nothing heard about Sun's platform since.It's not clear exactly how … [Read more...] about New Initiative Aims to Stamp Out Cloud Lock-In

The rise of Microsoft Azure as a major competitor to Amazon Web Services has become a mixed blessing for IT managers. While many were pleased to see Microsoft finally become a cloud-first company and build Azure into a viable alternative to AWS, they now are faced with a new set of challenges in trying to make the most of multiple cloud providers.Every indication is that the adoption of cloud services will continue to accelerate as more and more organizations discover the economic value of moving to on-demand solutions. Enterprise cloud spending will grow at a 16 percent compound annual growth (CAGR) run rate through 2026, Wikibon has forecast.AWS dominates the market, with US$4.1 billion in sales in its most recent fiscal quarter, a nearly 42 percent rise from the same period a year earlier.Organizations increasingly have been seeking to leverage a variety of cloud services to address an assortment of IT and business needs.The worldwide public cloud services market will grow 18 … [Read more...] about ANALYSIS Biggest Obstacle to Business Success: Multicloud Management

As cloud popularity grows, so does the collection of free or low-cost online office tools that services like Microsoft Office Online and Google Docs/G Suite provide.However, those two major league offerings, along with a swarm of other cloud-based productivity platforms, are proprietary. Open source vendors have been promising a free open source online alternative. Until now, online open source office suites have been little more than vaporware.You can get your document work done fine using an open source local installation. Exchanging documents via email attachments or shared links to files stored on Dropbox and other cloud storage farms work reasonably well for low-level collaborative team tasks.However, the inconvenience factor kicks in very quickly when you try to handle collaborative tasks and need access to a continual stream of live edits. That is when a cloud-based open source office suite is sorely missed.Kolab Systems last month announced Kolab Now, a full-featured online … [Read more...] about LINUX PICKS AND PANS Kolab Now Is a Smooth On-Ramp for LibreOffice Online